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About Us

Coming from the hospitality industry we’ve experienced, and are well aware of, the pressures operators are under to attract customer, produce great food and make a profit.

That’s why we’ve approached MAM like any good chef – we’ve taken the best ingredients, (You, the FIR, suppliers, and the EHO) blended in mobile technology and brought these together to produce an outstanding dish (OK, an app) that meets the mark.

So Why MAM?

MAM is designed to keep you in the kitchen doing what you do best – cooking great dishes.

MAM stands for Menu Allergen Management and that’s exactly what our solution does, not costing, not stock and it’s not a front to offer you other things such as training, consultancy other systems or nutritional analysis.

If you need some of these aspects then MAM isn’t for you; our objective is focused on helping you to comply with the legislation, demonstrate to the EHO that you’re compliant and to attract more custom. Using the commodities you buy MAM will use the information on the packaging to quickly compile a list of ingredients, identify the allergens and publish this to a dedicated website that we provide where your customers can quickly and easily see the best dish for them.

….and if you can do all this from your smartphone/ipad/tablet without having to sit in front of a PC?

Allergens as easy as 1, 2, 3

We recognise that in many cases the menu changes every day and sometimes within service depending on what is available from the market and how well dishes have been selling. That’s why we’ve kept the process as simple as possible to ensure you’re compliant in three easy steps.

Name your dish

Scan the barcode for each ingredient

Share/Publish the information.

MAM will date/time stamp the allergen profile of your dish and publish it to your own dedicated MAM webpage and social media streams. We will even let you know how many views your menu gets and share this via the MAM social networks.

If you have to change a dish part way through service just re-scan your ingredients and you’re up to date.

The Regulations – You Need To Be Compliant

The regulations affect every food business in Europe no matter what size, the service style or the type of food served and that any organisation serving unpackaged foods, or food that is wrapped on site for immediate consumption will have to supply details of their dishes that contain any of the named 14 allergens.

That means that if you run a place such as restaurant, bistro, pub, wine bar, café, school, brasserie, coffee shop, tea room, mobile catering outlet, hospital, pop up restaurant, fast food outlet, concession within another establishment, event, banquet or function location, club, cinema, theatre, museum, service station then the legislation applies to you. This list is not exhaustive and if your type of establishment isn’t listed you more than likely still need to comply.

You have to know if the ingredients you are using include any of the 14 allergens so you can’t say all dishes “could contain” or “may contain”.

Customers need to know where they can find the allergen information so you will need to either display a sign asking them to ask or it could be on menus, noticeboards, tickets, counter signs, table talkers or provided verbally by a trained member of staff.

The key part of the legislation is that your information needs to be accurate, verifiable and consistent.

FIR Law Abiding

Compliant & Up-To-Date

Demonstrates to the EHO that you are meeting your legal obligation.- & -Date stamps as you add recipes so you’re always up to date.

Barcode Scanner

Reads the barcode of the products you use and identifies the allergens.

(also includes hundreds of non-barcode ingredients like fruit & veg)

Manually Add Ingredients

Continuously updating as it allows users to manually input ingredients and their allergens that aren’t recognised by the system.

Information from Suppliers

Allergen information from the supplier or manufacturer direct to you...aDisplayed on a bespoke webpage, where your customers can see allergen information for your menu.

Signage & QR Codes

Includes signage for your business to help your customers find out about allergens on your menu quickly and easily, giving your customers confidence in you.

So What’s the Potential?

If you were able to tap into a growing market, that knew exactly what they wanted, you were able to meet that demand (with a little work) and they were more than happy to pay for it – would you make the effort?

The number of food allergy sufferers in the UK stands at around 3% of the population (1 Million adults and 900,000 children – remember each child has two parents). Meaning that where nearly 4 Million people decide to eat is influenced by what they can eat… and we’ve not even begun to talk about those with intolerances!

To date there has been a reluctance for these 4M people to eat our as it’s not easy for them to choose either a place to eat or what to eat once they go somewhere. Current estimates are that this market is worth in excess of £200M per year.

Would you like a slice of the pie? #askyourmam

MAM Certified

Every MAM user will benefit from a dedicated online report that can be accessed via a unique QR code; in addition they will be listed on http://mam.solutions and receive an accreditation certificate that can be downloaded and displayed in their establishment.

Allergy or Intolerance?

UK hospital admissions for food allergies has increased 500% since 1990 (Gupta, 2007) so for allergy sufferers the ability to identify if the food they’re eating is safe can be a matter of life of death.

Estimates are that are an additional 5 Million people who suffer from food intolerances, their’s isn’t life threatening however can make them ill. Whilst they may not make the press they will almost certainly won’t return to your place is they suffer.

Research has shown that each sufferer could influence up to 8 other people when deciding to eat so it’s in your own interest to keep this information up to date and share with as many people as possible.

Environmental Health Officers/Trading Standards

The legislation will be policed by the above parties who will make sure that you are keeping your records up to date and providing the information to the public as prescribed.

At the moment the law states that any failure to comply could lead to a fine of £5,000. However in discussions with various bodies we have heard many different things including that there may be a warning process such as the improvement notices followed by a fine through to the fine being extended to every dish you have on the menu that hasn’t been profiled. Keep an eye out on http://mam.solutions or @allergymam for more up to date information.

Whatever the outcome we’re sure you wouldn’t want to harm the reputation you’ve worked so hard to build; would you?

The 14 Allergens

Celery

Cereals containing Gluten

Crustaceans

Eggs

Fish

Lupin

Milk

Molluscs

Mustard

Nuts

Peanuts

Sesame

Soybeans

Sulphur Dioxide & Sulphites

MAM’s Cupboard

MAM works with a number of leading foodservice suppliers collating their information into a central database, plus it is connected to a European database of over 65,000,000 barcodes.

When is come to allergens it doesn’t matter how much is present it’s either in or it’s not so using the barcode is a quick and easy way to check what allergens are present. If the ingredient isn’t in the database you can easily add it using the information on the label and for those things without labels we include a list of commonly used ingredients as standard.

The database is constantly updated by suppliers and a complete list of whom is included at http://mam.solutions. MAM will even tell you when a supplier has changed or added to their information!

Foodservice Suppliers

The introduction of FIR 1069/2011 has been one of the biggest changes to the industry in recent history and you’re undoubtedly inundated with requests for information. If you would like to include your product information on our website, we will provide you with the ability to display your logo and complete future updates.